Page:Posthumous poems (IA posthumousswinb00swin).pdf/24

 burne composed this ode in the Spring of 1857. He was just twenty years of age, and this was, with all its puerile shortcomings, the most powerful and accomplished work which he had written up to that time. We are, therefore, met by the question: Why did he publish it neither then, nor later? For this an answer is readily forthcoming. In 1857 he had no means of publishing anything, except the slight and imitative verses which he presently contributed to Undergraduate Papers. For that ephemeral periodical, the Ode to Mazzini was eminently unfitted. But the tide of history was running fast, and the lyric visions of 1857 were soon left high and dry on the shore of time. After the diplomatic isolation of Austria in 1858, after the war ending with the Peace of Villafranca in July 1859, after the death of Bomba and the capture of the Two Sicilies by Garibaldi in 1860, Swinburne's wild and vague aspirations became hopelessly old-fashioned, The interest of his ode was temporary, and its political purpose had ceased to exist.

Another reason why, when Swinburne became a prominent poet, he could not publish the Ode to Mazzini, may be found in its form. It is an irregular ode, of the Pindaresque sort, on the model which was invented by Cowley, and constantly employed during the close of the